“What?”
“No offense, really. But leave me alone.”
“Nobody wants to be alone.”
“Terrific. Then how about if you just get the hell out of my way.”
She ignored that and glided beside me, the hem of her dress drifting against her knees as she unwound Lester from my leg and lifted him into her arms and held him like a baby. I didn’t think anything in the world could ever unsettle me anymore, but I was starting to get that feeling.
“You carry a lot of guilt,” she said.
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“No. I don’t.”
“You sure of that?” I asked.
“Some of us set down our burdens.”
“Some of you are assholes.”
She let loose with a delicate giggle that floated around for a minute like cotton candy on the wind. “Isn’t everybody?”
“Just about.”
She quit talking for a while but kept up with my quick pace. I couldn’t shake her. 1 wanted to run and didn’t know why. Maybe it had something to do with her belly. I kept flashing on Megan, pregnant and cheerful, scribbling names on a piece of paper and asking me which ones 1 liked. One column for boys, the other for girls, and me pushing for the sonogram.
I wondered if Brando was still going through the motions, maybe trying a little of On the Waterfront or The Wild One by now. Tennessee Williams must’ve been spitting up bottle caps in his grave.
“You’re from down south,” she said. “Whereabouts?”
“All of it.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. You’ve hardly any accent. And you’ve got a New Yorker attitude.”
“Anybody who’s dealt with a lot of people does.”
“Maybe that’s true.”
“I think it is.”
She kept on smiling and Lester glared in my direction, flicking his tongue at me. That titter slipped out of her unconsciously, like a nervous tic. It was getting under my skin for no reason at all. She really did remind me too much of Megan when Megan carried Jonah, so lovely in the pale morning light. They both had that same kind of childlike candor.
“I’m Lala,” she said.
“Your parents named you Lala?”
“I named myself that.”
“Oh.”
“I should be in charge of my own identity, don’t you think?”
“Sure.”
“You can, you know,” she told me. “It’ll be fine. Go ahead.”
“I can what?”
“Touch me.”
It stopped me for a second. It wasn’t a sexual come-on, just a friendly gesture. She’d sensed my urgency to hold that life close and she’d made the sympathetic offer. I didn’t realize my needs were so transparent. My geek self was bleeding through, out of control and wailing in the dirty straw.
I gently laid the back of my hand against her belly and felt the pulsing of her warm womb.
My ancestry called to me in my veins. It’s happened before. Nature expects value from us. I closed my eyes and was fine for a moment, standing there smirking and floating away, and then it got to be too much. A surge of memories brought up all my love and bile in one swift surge. I yanked my hand away as if scalded, but it was already too late and always had been. A moan began to rise in my chest and I choked it back down. The girl wore Megan’s smile.
I was nothing but memories now, stuffed with them, fueled by them. Lala’s eyes flitted, that serene gaze wafting across me, here and there. Her clothes smelled of hash and ten dollar cigars, but whether she’d been smoking or it was simply this place, I didn’t know. Lester looked a little high.
“You haven’t come here to find out anything about life,” Lala said, “so it must be about death.”
I let that one go by. “Do you know where Paynes is?”
“Paynes? Jesus, is that what you’re here for?” Again her grin angled up, the fanciful glint shining in her eyes. “I should’ve guessed. No wonder you carry a lot of guilt, if that’s who you’re after.”
“Where is he?”
“Nobody knows that.”
“I bet my father does,” I said. I hadn’t meant to speak it aloud. I was slipping more and more.
“Why?”
“I’ve got an instinct for these things. Paynes might have seen him.”
“Your father? You’re after your father? Why?”
“Because the old man stole my son from me and I want him back.”
“Why?”
“You’re a pretty annoying cooch,” I told her.
“Whatever that means. I like the sound of your voice. There’s power there. You take charge.”
“It’s a gift.”
“Is it?”
I thought about that. We could go around in circles for days. No wonder I didn’t like her much. “Probably not.”
Lester seemed to have a lot on his mind. He wavered as he slid into Lala’s arms, rising and flowing, quietly hissing. Perhaps he’d heard about me gnawing off the heads of his cousins for a pint of gin. A thing like that got around. Lala kissed him between the eyes, nodded at me as if she’d be back shortly, and turned away. I blinked and she was gone.
Fishboy Lenny waved a flipper after her. Or maybe he just wanted to say good-bye to Lester.
Jolly Nell said, “A sweet girl. Don’t get this one killed.”
I wandered on.
7
Nicodemus stood tall. Barely topping 5‘9 in his boots, he still carried with him an imposing will. Raw-boned and wiry with especially large hands hanging off his thin wrists. One arm was always slightly akimbo, as if he were about to elbow somebody in the ribs. He spoke hard words, inflexible and severe, yet his voice was always calm, almost mild, even when damning some poor bastard on the spot.
He took to the bottle early and only gave it up whenever he found Jesus. When he lost Jesus he’d find the bottle again, and that’s the way it went on for most of his life. He knew himself but never truly understood what he wanted, and his expectations were convoluted at best.
He’d drifted across Oklahoma and Texas working on oil well crews and laying pipe for the drilling rigs, preaching to the other vagrants and runaway kids that rambled into camp. He used a trenching shovel to hurl a Rotary-rig operator off a derrick during a drunken brawl and just kept on kicking it down to Mexico until he faded into the jungles. He hooked up with a missionary in South America for a time and took a couple of poisoned blow darts in the back. Two small but thick puckered scars rose from just over his kidneys, close enough together to have been serpent fangs. Sometimes the symbol matters a lot more than the message.
He never said how he and my mother had met. For a while 1 assumed she was a river-bottom whore who’d begun to tire of the business. It was common in those parts. But eventually I found a few black-and-white photos he’d cached away. There were looping ball-point scribbles on the back, and though 1 tried for years to decipher the words, I never did.
The photographs showed a young woman with a heart-shaped face framed by a toss of brown curls. She wore a somewhat sad smile and in every picture she was looking down or away. Fingers splayed as if warding off the camera. She had petite porcelain white hands.
1 took her, whoever she was, to be my mother. 1 needed her that much, and 1 thought those hands would have appealed to Nicodemus enough for him to marry her.
My mother died giving birth to me, in the center of the storm, at the bottom of a drainage ditch. Nicodemus had quit on Jesus by then, come back to the States, and started working as a fry cook at a truck stop where the lot lizard whores took home at least half his pay. He got along well with the truckers. They engaged each other in their tales of adventure and hardship traveling across the country, the women they laid, the jails they’d done time in. For the most part I could picture him as an agreeable and jocular man, though by the time I could talk he was neither.
Oddly enough, for someone who spent eighteen hours a day out of the house, he was home for her when she went into
labor. My mother already had a small valise packed. She’d fed the cats and used a neighbor’s phone to call ahead to the hospital. She’d blown out the candles and sat waiting on the couch while he buckled his pants on. Nicodemus had been ignoring the bills over the last few months and yet she’d never argued with him over any of it. Had she lacked the nerve? Had he beaten her into meek compliance? I didn’t believe so. I’d thought about it for a long time. She must’ve known that the only way to handle my father was to leave him be—whether he was boozing or on the ground bleeding.
He’d been drunk for three days and driving her to the hospital in his pickup truck when they hit a muddy curve too fast, flipped on Highway 17 and went over a twenty-five-foot embankment. My father passed in and out of consciousness for the next several hours, driven by her screams, he said, while angels called to him and the tips of their gleaming strange wings brushed against his lips.
He said.
Nicodemus had been spattered and blinded by motor oil, transmission fluid and streaming water. The rain poured in through the smashed windshield and put out the flames creeping near the ruptured gas tank. When he came to again he realized they were upside down, my mother trapped in her seat belt, her twisted legs hanging wide open toward his face. I was already squirming from her shattered pelvis as her heart continued to feed the muscles that shoved me forward into the world.
With his left arm broken and pinned beneath the wreckage he reached over with his free hand and caught me as I slithered from her womb, already falling.
He managed to undo her bloody blouse and pressed me to my mother’s dying breast, where I fed until long after her milk and body had turned cold. I’d been nursed by a corpse.
It was the truth, but the story had plenty of tragedy, tear-jerking melodrama, miracle and morbidity in it, which worked wonders on the stage.
How they came in droves to see the child preacher who’d been born in the midst of lightning, with a torrent of rain washing across his dead mother, while his father slowly began to drown and held the babe up above the raging waters of that black ditch. And everybody especially liked the gleaming wings of angels bit.
It was my father’s first gesture toward becoming myth, and that was all he really needed. By the time a passing trucker hauling cabbage stopped to help, and the rescue crews arrived, Nicodemus was back on the trail to God and so hopped up on Jesus that his broken arm didn’t even bother him.
Neither did the death of my mother.
He had a son.
8
I walked around the Works for a day and a half. I sat in on a few classes. One instructed you on how to prepare cheese blintzes in blackberry sauce. Always put the “seam-side” of the crepes down on the wax paper, cooking the blackberries in a sauce pan over low heat until bubbling, then pulping them with a potato masher. Jolly Nell couldn’t sit beside me because there was only one free seat, so she found a place in the back where she could take up three chairs.
She made such sounds of delight at each step of the preparation that the chef eventually focused all his attention on her, whether he saw her or not, and held up the plates to show off the ingredients before and after adding them together. Depending on the blackberries and your preferences, you might want to strain out the seeds using a sieve. Add sugar, mix water and cornstarch in a small cup and pour into the sauce. Serve on the side or put a dollop on each blintz.
Another lecture was for a martial arts-street fighting class that taught forty ways to kill a man with your bare hands. I walked in during the middle of it and watched two guys hold back their fervor while speaking clearly and with authority, dropping one another to a cement floor without any mats. I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the guy next to me and jotted a few helpful notes.
Striking the nasion, which is the summit of the nose, with sufficient force may result in death. Attacking the philtrum, the area between the upper lip and the bottom of the nose, may also cause mortal damage. I liked that term “mortal damage” and underlined it several times. I resisted the urge to add an asterisk. A sharp blow to the Adam’s apple can cause a man to asphyxiate. A blow to the base of the cerebellum, at the nape of the neck, can bring about death.
Catch someone in a full nelson and bend his neck forward until it breaks or the supply of spinal fluid is cut off to the brain. The Russian Omelet had you cross an enemy’s legs and fold him by pinning his shoulders to the ground, upside down and sitting on his legs until the base of his spine cracked. The Brain Buster placed a man in a headlock as you quickly grabbed his belt and yanked him into the air until he was vertical and upside down. Then you dropped him on his head, which absorbed your combined weight. Most effective on concrete or gravel.
1 really wanted a crepe now, but by the time I got back to the first room the class had become a performance art piece. I might’ve been seeing things but it appeared that the walls had been let out a few extra feet. I couldn’t figure out how it was done. Six ballerinas carried television sets with live video feed and mimed making love to the various faces that sprang across the screens. I kind of enjoyed watching the show, but I was still hungry for a blintz.
The size of the spaces in the Works was deceiving, the way they could run into one another, alternating, traveling, transforming. Construction went on overhead, workers doing some brick work. Bulky guys in hard hats moved machinery and scaffolding. Murals and posters were being put up and taken down with great frequency. Even advertisements, local sales. Who the hell cared about discounts to Six Flags Great Adventure? Who could ever get out of here and play on the rides?
Like graffiti, the process was ongoing and profitless. If one leg on the vast amount of scaffolding buckled the whole setup would drop and take out two hundred people. Kids composed haiku and smoked grass under it, elderly couples strolling along with their canes and kerchiefs.
Nell said, “I smell bacon.”
My stomach trembled.
“Me too,” I told her, but I knew it wasn’t bacon. So did she. I tried slipping by her but she grabbed my shoulder with one of her massive hands, held me up and carried me along. It had weight and solidity. Juba’s shadow fell across my face and 1 was suddenly cool and in darkness. At times they appeared to interact with the world and be seen by others. People bounced off Jolly Nell or gazed upon the entirety of Juba, and women flirted with Hertzburg and all his hair.
I said, “I can’t remember if you’re alive or dead.”
Hertzburg frowned and shrugged as we passed by a barber shop. “You’ve said that about yourself as well.”
“I know it.”
“Does it really matter to you that much?”
“Sometimes.”
He smelled of burned—”Maybe you’ll figure it out.”
“I get the feeling I won’t.”
“Who gives a shit at this point? So long as you finish what’s been started. Don’t put such a high premium on truth.”
“Me?”
A new warren of paths and alleys opened. Scattered in the corridors of the Works people slept, sketched, sat reading Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, newspapers and menus. Playing the clarinet, dropping acid and chalking pentagrams on the floor. They recited puerile passages from Crowley and LaVey. I used to do the same thing.
I expected to see religious fanatics, a few Jesus freaks going off the deeper end, but there weren’t any. That surprised me. The hordes of rats hung back in the converted meat lockers knocking off the weak, and the Goth-gurrls and leather-deathers wearing their scars and vampire paleness giggled like virgins and scampered around the show rooms painting themselves with latex.
Juba said, “He won’t come to you now, you know, in your vague and ugly dreams.”
“Oh yes, he will.”
“No, Nicodemus could reach you across all your nightmares while you were on the outside—”
“So?”
“—but now even your vengeance belongs to the Works.”
I coul
dn’t help it. I burst out laughing.
Not that cool clear kind of chuckling but the real rot-gut that brings up acid from the back end of your life. It kept coming and coming while I gasped and wheezed, my heart starting to hurt and my muscles locked out of place. 1 glanced at the enormity surrounding me, understanding that it was nowhere near large enough to contain all my hate.
Finally 1 settled back and wiped the tears off my chin.
Fishboy Lenny said, “Mwoop fwsshh mwaop mwaop,” and I totally agreed with him, whatever it meant.
“Yeah, buddy.”
“Mwoop.”
1 went to find a place to drop off, in order to hear the harsh and bitter words of my father.
9
Megan believed in redemption and revelation, down where it mattered. She blamed me for that. I had healed her once, she said, at twelve. Troubles in her stomach, brought on by a beating from her older brother after he’d kneed her out in the woodshed, prying her legs apart.
She’d had ulcers throughout her childhood, with her grandfather offering rags dipped in sterno to kill the pain. Hemorrhaging for months and dealing with the bruises and cramps. The constant nausea of hopelessness and loss terrified her less than something unknown. She was changing.
The discomfort and swelling in her belly grew worse each day until her parents finally dead-bolted her in her bedroom, away from the truancy officers and sheriff’s deputies. Its sole window faced the woodshed, where her brother wept and howled and threw his shoulder against the chained door. He had changed too.
Her grandfather, spitting blood, sneaked her out of the house, still gulping sterno and letting her suck a soaked shred of cloth. He carried her most of the six miles to the tent revival all-night sing, where I laid my hands upon her.
The next morning she blessed my name because the pain was gone. God had become second string. A lifetime of prayers had been answered at last and heaven had nothing to do with it.
She whispered my praises as her mama bundled up the bedsheets and set fire to them in the yard.
Her brother had broken his neck hurling himself against the woodshed wall, sometime before sunrise. Her parents didn’t cry. They didn’t bother to bury him. They tossed his corpse onto the fire and then collected the bones and ashes and threw them into the scrub.
Four Dark Nights Page 18